


Get Spooky

by Gin_Juice



Series: picture book [10]
Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Ben learning about Ghost Culture, Brief homophobia, Dysfunctional Family, Family Fluff, Halloween, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Klaus is good with kids, M/M, Post-Apocalypse, Post-Canon, Pranks and Practical Jokes, Taxidermy, Trick or Treating, lots of taxidermy, not so good with their parents, some might say too much
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-31
Updated: 2019-10-31
Packaged: 2021-01-15 18:02:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,560
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21257378
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gin_Juice/pseuds/Gin_Juice
Summary: Klaus has the costume, the candy, and the decorations.Ben has plans for the night.Dave has some light reading material in the form of one of Sir Reginald's weird journals he found in the attic, and it's shaping up to be a pretty good time all around.“Klaus. Sweetheart. I know you’re just excited about Halloween, but right now you’re straight-up trying to lure small children away from their parents with candy. Maybe take a step back and think this over for a second.”_______________________Happy Halloween!





	Get Spooky

**Author's Note:**

> This is part of a series, but you don't have to read previous installments to follow along- Basically, the Apocalypse has been averted, and the kids are working on becoming a real family. The boys plus Dave's ghost are all living at the Academy, and Dave has been slowly integrating Ben into his circle of Ghost Friends. They also recently acquired a pair of kittens, which the readers helped me name.

“Okay, how’s this?”

Klaus turned away from the mirror to show off his makeup. Dramatic black lines slashed from his eyelids to his temples like wings, highlighted by neon pink and gold.

“Well… it looks great, sweetheart, but I’m not sure Morticia Addams did her eyeliner like that.”

Klaus crossed his arms and smiled in an I’m-humoring-you sort of way. “Dave. Love of my life, apple of my eye. This isn’t her everyday look, this is how she’d do her makeup if she was going to an 80’s-themed Halloween party.”

“Oh.” Dave studied his face. “Yeah, alright. Spot on.”

“Thank you,” Klaus said, inspecting his left side in the mirror. “Is Luther back from the store yet? We have to make sure he got _good_ candy this time, because if he comes home with more Milk Duds I’m gonna shit in one of his shoes.”

Klaus… hadn’t been real impressed with Luther’s picks after his first trip to buy candy for trick-or-treaters. And he’d absolutely plotzed when Diego had gone along for the second try and come home with little boxes of raisins.

“I’m sure Five has it handled,” Dave assured him. “Third time’s the charm, right?”

Klaus made a face in the mirror. “Five only likes chocolate. They need to get some sour things, too, for the full candy palate. God, I’m going to end up having to go myself, aren’t I?”

He heaved a sigh as he packed up his cosmetics case. “Well, it’s like they say! If you want a job done right, don’t give it to Luther.”

Dave lowered his head to hide his smile. It hadn’t come as a surprise to learn that Halloween was Klaus’s favorite holiday, but he was blown away by how much work he’d put in to make sure everything was his personal version of perfect. In another life, Klaus might have been a very specific type of event planner.

He just loved the spirit of it all. The costumes, the candy, the gothic decorations. It helped, too, that the actual spirits cut him a break.

_“What are you guys _doing_ on Halloween, anyway?”_ Klaus had asked as they laid in bed one night last week. _“Is there some kind of annual ghost conference Ben never got invited to?”_

_“There are just more targets,”_ Dave had explained. _“Every teenage girl with a Ouija board is trying to contact the dead. At least a few of their calls are going to get through.”_

_“So, what, you’re all out haunting kids? And here I thought you were a friendly ghost, Davey-cakes.”_

_“Well, they _are_ asking for it. It’s consensual haunting.”_

Klaus dropped the last tube of lipstick into his bag and spun around on his heel. “Okay! My face is on point, the house is on point, I can change into my dress later—let’s go make some spaghetti.”

He’d proposed and scrapped so many plans in the past few days that Dave had honestly lost track of what they needed spaghetti for, but it was usually better just to roll with these things.

He gestured towards the door. “After you.”

The hallway was cool, and once Klaus’s bedroom door clicked shut behind them, it filled with a wet, grating rasp that they both remembered well from the battlefields of Vietnam.

The death rattle.

Klaus’s own breath hitched, and Dave tried to squeeze his shoulder only to find that his hand phased right through it.

There was a figure at the end of the hall. A man, tall and square-shouldered. He took a slow step forward, and the light of the window revealed the smart attire of the 1920’s or 30’s, heavily soiled by blood and innumerable bullet wounds.

Half his face was missing. When he opened his mouth to speak, the long, private muscle of his tongue glistened wet and obscene.

“Katz! Happy Halloween, boyo!”

“Hey, Angelo!” Dave called. He tipped his head at Klaus. “Klaus, this is my friend Angelo. Angelo, this is my boyfriend. Who can see you, you remember.”

“Yeah?” He studied Klaus with naked curiosity. “D’you always wear makeup, or is it a costume?”

“Uh…” Klaus blinked owlishly, then leaned closer to Dave. “What did he say?” he muttered out of the corner of his mouth.

Angelo didn’t sound half bad for a guy who was only working with about two thirds of a jaw, but the way he talked did take some getting used to. That wasn’t always a bad thing, when you were introducing him to new people—whatever filter might have once existed between his mind and his mouth seemed to have been shot clean off.

“He said it’s nice to meet you,” Dave whispered in Klaus’s ear.

He straightened up, trying to ignore the skeptical look Klaus was throwing him. “What’s good, Ange? You going out tonight?”

“Is the Pope Catholic? The good stuff doesn’t kick off until sundown, but some of us are gonna go cruise around the college dorms and see if anyone’s trying to summon Beelzebub yet. You coming?”

Dave shook his head. “Nah, I’m staying in this year.” He grinned at Klaus. “I’ve got all the entertainment I need right here.”

Klaus beamed at him. Angelo pointedly gagged on his exposed tongue and pantomimed cracking a whip.

“Ben might want to go with you, though.”

“What?” asked Klaus, his mouth settling into a frown.

“Yeah. I mean, why not, right? He’d have a good time, I think.”

Klaus cleared his throat, his eyes sharp. “Well. As sure as I am that he’d be in good hands with this…” His gaze darted to Angelo, whose tongue had flopped through the hole in his cheek to loll against his face. Using two fingers, he jammed it back inside. “… gentleman, I think maybe—maybe!— Halloween night isn’t the best time for him to start sowing his wild oats.”

Dave raised an eyebrow. “Sweetheart. He’s already dead. What are you worried might happen?”

“Ghost herpes is just a rumor,” Angelo piped up helpfully, if unintelligibly. “I know, because I was the one who started it. Funny story, actually, I had met this—“

“Okay, Ange, thank you,” Dave cut him off. He offered Klaus a comforting smile. “Really, though. There is a very, very limited amount of trouble he could get himself into.”

“Plenty of stuff could still go wrong,” protested Klaus. His eyes softened, and in a lower voice, he added, “He’s never really gone anywhere by himself, you know.”

Dave let out a breath. He wished he had a physical body just then, so he could kiss that worried look right off of his face.

“He’ll be alright,” he said in a gentle tone. “Ben is an adult, too, sweetheart. And my friends are all very nice people, I promise. They won’t let anything happen to him.”

“I’ll treat him like I did my own kid brother,” pledged Angelo. “Who was stabbed to death in a church, may God rest his soul.”

Klaus gave Dave a quizzical look, but he simply smiled and nodded like Angelo had just said something reassuring.

He didn’t need to translate _every_ word.

{}{}{}{}{}

None of the siblings talked all that much about their father, but Dave still had a pretty good idea of what kind of man he’d been.

Full of criticism, and empty of normal human warmth. Overbearing and distant at the same time, probably too smart for his own good. The sort of person who saw a sense of humor as a weakness, and who set every clock in the house by his own watch.

In a word, an asshole.

They were all more or less in agreement on that point. But there was something else that none of them ever hinted at, something that, to Dave at least, was as plain as the nose on his face: The guy had been weird _as fuck._

Who wore a monocle when regular eyeglasses were a thousand times more convenient? Why was there a genuine Fabergé egg in the same glass display case as a bunch of plastic action figures? Making your children fight crime is bad enough, but do you really need to put them in skintight cat suits to do it?

And, the most pressing question of all at the moment—how many goddamn taxidermy birds did a single person _need?_

“God, the one cool thing Dad owned and he got rid of them!” Klaus kicked at a box on the attic floor in frustration, sending dust mites spiraling through a beam of sunlight. “Ruining my life from beyond the grave!”

Over the last week, they’d scrounged up seven stuffed crows and three ravens, but Klaus had his heart set on the pair of vultures that had once perched above the mantle in the living room. The decorating scheme out front wouldn’t be complete without them, he insisted.

So, that was twelve taxidermy birds. Thirteen, including the ostrich in the study. Dave couldn’t come up with a single good reason to have more than one or two, but that was the power of money, he supposed.

You walked into, say, an efficiency apartment in Brooklyn, and found it full of taxidermy deer and bears and antelope, and you might think you were in the presence of a serial killer. But you walked into the Hargreeves mansion and found the same thing, and suddenly the owner wasn’t a nutjob—he was just _eccentric._

Dave wasn’t fooled, though. Crazy was crazy, whether it was riding the bus or being chauffeured in a Rolls Royce.

“Maybe it’s better to stick with the crows,” he said. “You put too many dead birds out there and it stops being festive, you know? It’s just… the weird house with too many dead birds.”

Klaus turned to give him a sulky look over his shoulder. “Stop trying to make me more tasteful, David. Halloween is the one day a year I get to be as morbid and tacky as I want. _And I want.”_

Well, that was ghoulish. But fair, he guessed.

His gaze moved across the room to Ben, who was sitting cross-legged on the floor flipping through what looked to be an old photo album.

“Oh! Pictures?” Dave asked, pleasantly surprised. “Can I see?”

Most of the photos of Klaus and company as children were press clippings where they were wearing those stupid masks. It was a shame, because they’d been awfully cute kids.

He had a fleeting memory of his grandmother licking her entire hand to slick his sisters’ hair back, loudly proclaiming _‘Let us see your whole face!’_

“They’re all of Dad’s artwork and antiques and stuff,” said Ben, idly turning the page. “He used to take pictures of everything valuable. It was for insurance stuff, I think.”

…Alright, then.

Ben’s face lit up. “Ha! The Vermeer! Remember that, Klaus?” He grinned up at Dave. “When we were like, eight, Dad bought a Vermeer painting at auction, and then two weeks later someone wrote ‘BUTT’ on it with a marker. We never found out who did it.”

“Three guesses who got in trouble for it, though,” muttered Klaus.

Dave blew him a sympathy kiss. “So,” he said, turning back to Ben. “Did you decide if you’re going out tonight?”

Ben’s smile fell away and he bit at his lip. “No. I don’t know. Maybe.” He fiddled with the drawstring of his hoodie. “You’re definitely not going?”

Dave shook his head. “I’m on candy detail.”

“Right.” Ben gave him a hopeful look through his lashes. “Not even for a little while, though? Don’t you want to see your friends?”

It was on the tip of Dave’s tongue to say that yes, sure, he’d go for an hour or two if it would calm his nerves. But… no. If he did, Ben would wind up using him as human shield to avoid talking to anybody he hadn’t already met.

It was time for this little dead bird to leave the nest.

“They’ll still be around,” Dave said lightly. “Someone should go chaperone Ange, though. He needs help remembering to shut his trap sometimes.”

“Oh.” A crease formed between Ben’s eyebrows. “Yeah. You’re probably right.”

Across the room, Klaus popped up from behind a stack of boxes, looking exasperated. “Union break’s over.” He clapped his hands. “Back to work!”

Ben put the album aside with a roll of his eyes, and Dave turned his attention to a plastic crate in the corner. It wasn’t big enough to house two entire vultures, but in his personal opinion, there were already enough beady little bird eyes staring down from the front porch.

He lifted the lid off the crate and studied the contents. An uneasy feeling prickled down his arms.

These were some of Sir Reginald’s old things, he realized. Carefully folded clothing, several decades out of style. A battered passport. A pocket guide to Berlin. And a leather-bound journal, identical to the ones lining the shelves in his office.

Dave frowned down at it. The guy had diaries dating back thirty years downstairs. Why was this one in a box in the attic?

He flipped it open to the first page.

_March 17th, 1974_

Before the kids had been born. Well, it wasn’t snooping if there wouldn’t be anything inside about people he knew, right?

_I have arrived in Berlin. The train from Hamburg was delayed by nearly an hour due to construction on the tracks. I have seen little evidence of the vaunted German efficiency thus far, and I begin to wonder if perhaps it is a virtue that exists only on the other side of the wall. For all their high-handedness, the Soviets do not do things by halves._

Dave grimaced. Charming.

_My hopes for the meeting tomorrow are low. Zimmerman has proven himself to be a poor business partner, and continues to ignore my advice for increasing our profits. Furthermore, he has begun insinuating in his letters that he believes me to be too miserly with our workers. If only he knew what my true business is—averting Apocalypses is always a costly venture._

Apocalypses? As in… multiple?

On the other side of the room, Klaus gasped. Dave looked up, blinking a few times in surprise at the sudden intrusion.

“Did you find them?” Ben called.

“No! I found something even better!” Klaus stumbled out between stacks of boxes, lugging his prize along with him.

Dave’s eyes widened. “Is that a crash test dummy?”

“You bet your ass it is, baby!” Klaus crowed. “Ooh, this is a good day!”

“But… why? Why do you even have that?”

Ben crawled out from behind a shelf, brushing cobwebs from his hair. “Diego used to use it for target practice,” he explained. “But he thought it was creepy, so he hid it up here and told Dad it just disappeared one day.”

Klaus was waltzing around the room with it. “I’m gonna put it in his bed,” he crooned. “With candles, and flower petals, and—OH MY GOD.”

He spun around to face them, his eyes almost manic with glee. “Do you think Luther has any jazz records?”

Ben sat back against the shelf and sighed, and Dave tried to smile. “But what about the vultures?” he asked hopefully. “Don’t you want to find them?”

“Fuck the vultures!” Klaus tried to leap over a pile of old books, tripped and fell under the weight of the dummy, and was back on his feet in a flash.

“This is a million times better!” he panted. “This is an A-triple-plus Halloween trick!”

Dave studied the mannequin in his arms. It had painted-on eyebrows raised in a look of perpetual concern, but no mouth.

Before he could speak, Klaus stomped a foot. “If you really love me,” he said in a warning tone, “you’ll support me in my minute-long dream of posing this thing all sexy-like in my brother’s bed.”

…Well. It was his favorite holiday, after all.

{}{}{}{}{}

_March 18th, 1974_

_Zimmerman has ended our partnership. I knew—I knew!—I should never have let him retain majority control of the business, but this underhandedness was unprecedented. The absolute snake! I grow ever more convinced that humanity lacks any innate strength of character._

_I have an appointment tomorrow with a small automobile manufacturer. I can only hope that meeting proves more fruitful._

Sir Reginald’s journal hadn’t explained anything further about the ‘Apocalypses’ comment, but Dave was starting to understand why it had been thrown into a box and forgotten about.

Between the train delays and business misadventures, nothing about the trip to Germany was going well. Someone had stolen his wallet. The hotel had to evacuate at three in the morning due to a small fire. A stray dog had run by and nabbed his bagel as he was leaving a breakfast café.

The resulting diary was essentially just Sir Reginald having a fifty-page hissy fit.

Dave had to say, it was making for a pretty enjoyable read.

“Baaaabe, put that thing away and ogle me!”

Klaus had changed into his costume and touched up his makeup, adding bronzer to his chest for the illusion of cleavage. Dave had already told him how dynamite he looked several times, but that was Klaus for you—he soaked up compliments like a thirsty plant.

“Alright.” He set the journal aside and wolf-whistled. “Consider yourself ogled.”

Klaus shimmied his hips and dropped a handful of grapes into the bowl of now-cold spaghetti. “Are you getting fresh with me, soldier?”

“Do you want me to be?”

He fluttered his false lashes. “Maaaybe.”

Dave grinned and rose from his chair, but was interrupted by Ben phasing through the kitchen door.

“Guess I’m going out now,” he said, in a tone someone might use to announce that they were off to get a root canal. He looked pleadingly to Dave. “You’re really not coming?”

He shook his head, dragging Klaus backwards to lean against his chest. “Sorry. You’ll have a blast, though—you won’t even notice I’m not there.”

“Yes I will,” Ben mumbled.

“You could stay home,” suggested Klaus. “Help me hand out candy. Ooh, we can still make you a costume! I’ll get a sheet and cut out eye holes for you.”

Ben let out a reluctant laugh. “No. I said I’d go, so… Well, see you guys later, I guess. Remember to feed the babies, okay?”

The newest additions to the household were a pair of kittens, a birthday gift from Luther.

Ben, being a huge fan of _The Lord of the Rings_, had wanted to name them after his favorite characters from the books. Klaus, being sick to death of hearing about elves and orcs and hobbits, had wanted to name them after H.P. Lovecraft monsters, mainly because Ben hated the idea.

He’d slipped the male cat enough treats that he had started responding to the name Cthulhu, but ‘Shub-Niggurath, The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young’ had been a harder sell—and so the girl remained Merry.

Klaus watched Ben leave, then sighed and sagged into Dave’s arms like a sack of Jello.

“He’s so shy,” he murmured. “And nerdy. And a goody-two-shoes. And he still thinks his boots look cool. Oh my _God,_ he’s like a basement kid who’s escaping into public for the first time—tell me again that nothing’s going to happen to him?”

Dave pressed a kiss to his hair. “He’s going to be fine, sweetheart. He’ll have fun, and if he doesn’t, he’ll come home early.”

“Yeah, yeah, he’s a big boy now, I know.” He tilted his head backwards to give Dave a baleful look. “But if any of your friends make fun of him, they’re getting made corporeal, and then they’re getting slapped. Just a heads up.”

Dave gave his waist a squeeze. “Fair.”

They made their way outside. Klaus had draped a shimmery silver material over two of the dining room chairs—one for him, and one for a plastic skeleton with a martini glass hot-glued into its hand— and tacked purple and orange lights up over the door. An open cooler of dry ice had been placed under the card table he’d set up, strategically hidden from view by a row of pumpkins. The flock of dead crows stared down imperiously from the portico.

“Looks great,” Dave told him in admiration.

“I know.” Klaus glanced up from where he was propping the journal open with a Snickers bar for Dave to read if he wanted. “Are you sure you don’t want me to make you into a real boy? Everyone will just think you’re wearing a costume.”

Dave circled around him to sit in the chair with the skeleton. “A soldier with a bullet wound doesn’t make a great costume, sweetheart.”

“You could be the sheet ghost, then.”

Dave laughed and shook his head. “I’m good.”

Klaus let out a long sigh and slumped into his chair. “Just promise you’ll stay out here, okay?” He gave Dave a rueful smile, looking suddenly very tired even through his layers of makeup. “Clean Halloween is uncharted territory.”

Dave stretched his hand across the table, stopping just short of touching him. “Nowhere I’d rather be.”

Klaus placed his hand on top of Dave’s. It phased right through it, a feeling Klaus usually didn’t like, but he let it rest there. “You fucking cheeseball,” he said fondly.

They turned to watch the street. It wouldn’t be dark for a while yet, but there were already a few trick-or-treaters out and about, younger children being herded around by their parents.

After a minute or so, Klaus turned to Dave and frowned. “How come nobody is coming up here? They can see me, right?”

A young couple made their way down the sidewalk with a tiny Spiderman. Their pace picked up just a little in front of the Hargreeves house, the parents studiously avoiding eye contact despite Klaus’s stare.

“What was that?” he demanded. “I _know_ they saw me!”

“They can’t see me, though,” Dave pointed out. “It looks like you’re talking to yourself.”

“So? I’m a good conversationalist, I’m allowed.”

A woman walked by with two toddlers dressed as princesses, carrying a baby wearing a frog hat in her arms. Klaus stood up and waved at them.

“Hey! Yoo-hoo! You guys want some candy? I’ve got candy!”

One of the girls stopped and began doubling back, but her mother swiftly leaned down and grabbed her arm.

“What? No! Other princess, come here! She can’t stop both of you!” He held the bowl aloft. “Look, Sour Patch Kids!”

Dave leaned forward. “Klaus,” he said. “Sweetheart. I know you’re just excited about Halloween, but right now you’re straight-up trying to lure small children away from their parents with candy. Maybe take a step back and think this over for a second.”

Klaus grimaced. “Okay, point taken.” He set the bowl down. “HEY! LADY! WE GOT OFF ON THE WRONG FOOT, I’M NOT TRYING TO KIDNAP YOUR— Yeah, she can’t hear me anymore.”

He dropped back into his seat and crossed his arms over his chest. “This sucks.”

“Sorry, sweetheart,” Dave said sympathetically. “Talking to me more isn’t helping your case, by the way.”

“I’m not going to sit here in silence all night.” He kicked one heel against the leg of the chair, looking moodily off into space. After a few seconds, he rapped his knuckles on the table. “Got it! Be right back.”

Dave watched him disappear into the house in a flurry of black satin and glitter, like some kind of exotic bird taking flight. God_damn_ but he was foxy in that dress.

No one else nearby was wearing a costume half as eye-catching, so he turned his attention to Sir Reginald’s journal instead.

_March 25th, 1974_

_I am close to reaching an agreement with the automobile manufacturer here in Berlin, but have received unfortunate news from home. Steel prices continue to plummet, and the mill in Connecticut I have long invested in has shuttered its doors. _

_The instability of this planet’s global economy is endlessly vexing. Never before have I struggled so to secure my wealth._

Dave read the last two sentences over. They didn’t make any more sense the second time around.

Klaus trotted back outside dragging Five by the elbow, and pushed him into the chair with Dave and the skeleton.

“I don’t want to hand out candy,” Five complained. “I thought you were going to do it.”

“I am, but I need a cover so I can talk to my boo,” said Klaus. He grinned. “Ha! Boo! Because it’s Halloween? I should have my own HBO special.”

“Hilarious,” muttered Five.

“Don’t be such a grump! You can sit out here and do your numbers voodoo—“ he wiggled his fingers at the papers Five carried—“and I’ll do all the hard work.”

Five’s gaze roved over the table and the front steps. “Where_ is_ Dave?” he asked. “Am I sitting on him?”

“I don’t mind if he doesn’t,” Dave told Klaus.

Klaus relayed the message, and Five cocked his head to the side, considering. After a few moments of thought, he shrugged and spread his papers over the table.

“Whatever.”

Dave snorted. For the first few months after his reunion with Klaus, he had thought Five didn’t like him much—the rest of the siblings had warmed up to him by degrees, but Five remained distant.

He’d come to understand that he had just forgotten how human interaction was supposed to go. If they sat on opposite sides of a room ignoring each other for an hour, in Five’s mind, that was an hour they’d spent hanging out.

The street had temporarily cleared of trick-or-treaters, and Klaus reclined in his chair, staring skyward. Five tapped his pencil against his mouth. Dave skimmed Sir Reginald’s journal for a third time, wondering what in the heck he’d meant by ‘this planet.’

He was probably just being a ham, he decided. There was a real literary term for that and everything—simile, or purple prose, or… or some other fucking thing.

Oh well. The only times Dave had paid much attention in school were shop class and lunch.

“Hey,” Klaus said idly. “Do you ever think that maybe there are other colors that we haven’t found yet? Wouldn’t that be wild? Like, what if there’s a color that’s kind of yellow and kind of black, but it isn’t just a mix of yellow and black—it’s a whole new thing.”

“Humans only have so many types of color-receptor cones in their eyes,” Five informed him in a bored tone. “We as a species have reached the limit of how many colors we can see.”

“Yellack,” suggested Dave.

Klaus rolled his eyes at Five. “Thanks for the science lesson, Captain Killjoy.”

Five flipped his sheet of paper over without looking up. “You’re welcome.”

A miniature ballerina came racing up to the steps just then, followed by a woman in a witch’s hat.

“Trick or treat!” she trilled, thrusting her candy bag in Klaus’s face. “Your makeup is pretty. I wanted to put on makeup, but Mom said no. What kind of candy do you have? Is there gum?”

“Hm. Well, no gum, but in _this_ bowl, we have chocolate and Sour Patch Kids and lollipops.” Klaus shook the plastic bowl in his arms.

He reached out and tapped his fingernail against the larger bowl on the table, a fancy-shmancy silver deal that Dave had guessed was worth more than anything he’d owned in his entire life.

“And then in this one… Well. I don’t think a little girl would like what’s in this one.”

The witch cast him a wary look, but the ballerina rocked up on her tiptoes, intrigued.

“What’s in it?”

“Talk fast,” Dave urged him. “You’re losing Mom.”

Klaus heaved a dramatic sigh. “Well, I was brewing a potion, you see, and… there was a little mix-up in the kitchen. There’s candy in this bowl, too, but there’s also…”

“What?” the ballerina pressed.

Klaus leaned down so they were at eye-level. “Guts,” he said solemnly.

The witch peered over into the guts-free bowl. “Look, Maddie, there’s a Hershey bar,” she said. “You like Hershey—“

But the ballerina was already up to her elbow in the spaghetti.

“Eww, it’s slimy!” she complained in delight. “Gross, there’s an eyeball, Mom! I touched an eyeb—ooh, a Kit-Kat.”

Mom sighed and gave Klaus an apologetic smile. “Yes, I see. Very spooky.”

The little girl dropped her candy into her bag. She hesitated for a second, then crammed her arm back into the bowl.

“I won’t take another one, I just want to feel the guts some more,” she promised. “They’re so yucky!”

Klaus nodded with all the wisdom of a sage. “Very yucky,” he agreed.

Dave leaned back in his chair and smiled. Kids were so fucking strange. But then, so was Klaus, so it was no surprise they would get along.

The ballerina hummed under her breath as she squelched her hand around in the pasta and grapes. She scoured the crows and the pumpkins and the colored lights with clear approval, and then her gaze came to rest on Five.

“Aren’t you going trick-or-treating?” she asked.

Five raised his head, blinking in surprise like he wasn’t quite sure where these people on his porch had come from.

He offered the girl a strained smile. “No.”

“He’s a big kid, Maddie,” her mother explained. She winked at Five. “And it looks like he’s got some homework to do.”

Five stiffened in his seat so suddenly and dramatically that if Dave hadn’t been sharing it with him, he might have thought he’d been electrocuted.

“My little mathlete,” simpered Klaus.

“Alright, time to go now, honey. We want to get more candy before it gets too dark, right?”

“…Yeah.” The girl gave the spaghetti one last squeeze for good measure and stepped back with a longing look. “Thank you!”

Klaus waved as she darted down the steps. “Happy Halloween!”

Five stood up from his chair, his expression dark. “I’m going inside.”

“Oh, lighten up.” Klaus wriggled his shoulders. “Who knows, maybe if you stick around you can make a buddy who stole his dad’s beer, and then you guys can egg houses together.”

“Go fuck yourself,” Five suggested, then vanished.

Klaus turned to Dave with a frown. “Rude.”

“Go easy on him,” said Dave. “He gets frustrated.” He paused. “Maybe you should ask your Mom to come out here. She likes children, right?”

Grace would also put their parents at ease better than Five ever could. In Dave’s experience, you could get away with murder so long as you had a pretty blonde at your side.

Hell, he and his best pal Florence had ‘dated’ for most of age sixteen, and not a single soul had ever questioned why he was so excited to sleep over at his friend Danny’s place whenever Danny’s mother had to work a night shift.

“Oh, good idea!” Klaus got up. “Don’t eat all the candy while I’m gone.”

“No promises,” said Dave, leaning back over the journal.

_April 2nd, 1974_

_I received a letter from Pogo this morning, informing me the private collector I have been corresponding with has agreed to sell the Titian. It is far from his finest work, but I have found that classical art is the one commodity that never depreciates in value. _

_How is it, I wonder, that the same species can be so moved by the beauty of the Sistine Chapel as to preserve it for centuries, yet willingly consume a beverage as appalling as Coca-Cola? As ever, humanity is a study in contradictions. _

Hot damn, but Sir Reginald had been a snob. How had a man like that raised Klaus, who used to pretend he was jerking off his rifle as he cleaned it to make everyone around camp laugh? There was the real study in contradictions.

“Okay, just let me get this—“ Klaus jogged back out of the house as fast as he could in his platform heels and grabbed the skeleton out of the chair.

Grace took a seat and smoothed out her skirt, then allowed him to arrange it in her lap with her usual vague smile.

“Now you have a snuggle buddy!” Klaus announced as he draped its arm around her shoulder. “Don’t let Diego see, he’ll get jealous.”

She gave the skeleton a fond little pat on its plastic knee. “Of course not, dear.”

Dave stood up and moved to lean on the arm of Klaus’s chair to get a better angle on her.

He guessed the novelty of living with a robot had worn off a long time ago for her children, but he could stare at Grace for hours while she did nothing more exciting than hum and work on a cross-stitch.

How did she decide which patterns to make? Why did she like certain tunes more than others? Who would invent this incredible piece of technology, and then never use her for anything bigger than washing the dishes?

Grace was fascinating, and Sir Reginald had been well and truly off his fucking rocker.

“They should make more books for adults with pictures,” Klaus declared. He had unwrapped a lollipop while Dave was watching Grace, and it clacked against his teeth as he looked off into the distance. “Ooh, adult pop-up books! I should invent that.”

Dave raised an eyebrow. “A pornographic pop-up book?”

Grace let out a tinkling little laugh. “My, you children are all so creative!”

“Not necessarily pornographic,” Klaus said slowly, his brow furrowed in thought. “Just, adult-_themed,_ you know? Like a pop-up book about gun violence and property taxes.”

Dave hummed. “_Where’s Waldo_, except Waldo is wanted for murder.”

“Exactly!” Klaus beamed up at him. “Oh, man, I could sell a million copies of that. Okay, step one is learning how to draw—“

Two boys both dressed at Batman came running up the steps, trailed by a confused-looking toddler who had probably started off the night as a pirate, before he’d removed key pieces of his costume.

As Klaus gave his speech about the guts again, a man who must have been their grandfather sauntered up to the porch.

“Hey, hey, June Cleaver!” he said appreciatively to Grace. He nudged the smallest boy with his elbow. “That’s a character from a TV show that was on while the dinosaurs were still around. Why don’t you go get some candy?”

The boy responded by shoving his whole fist into his mouth.

Grandpa shrugged at Grace in a what-can-you? sort of way and glanced at Klaus. “Oh,” he said. “Your husband is a good sport letting you put makeup on him, isn’t he?”

Klaus froze, his eyes growing wide. Grace laughed in the way she did when someone talked nonsense to her.

“Okay, boys, say ‘thank you,’” the old man went on, oblivious. “Happy Halloween, all!”

Klaus looked out at the street with a thousand-yard stare while the children scrambled down the steps. After a moment of silence, he swiveled in his seat to face Dave.

“I did not care for that,” he announced in a tone of self-discovery.

Strangers in public sometimes assumed he was seeing one or another of his siblings when they went out together, and he always thought that was a regular laugh riot—but it was different, Dave guessed, when people thought you and your own mother were an item.

Klaus pressed his hands over his heart. “You need to be corporeal, _mi amor_. My delicate constitution can’t take another shock like that.”

“Parents and children can’t marry each other,” agreed Grace. “How silly!”

Was it Dave’s imagination, or had her smile just turned queasy?

He still didn’t want to be the asshole dressed up as a wounded soldier, but Klaus wasn’t taking ‘no’ for an answer. After some arguing, he borrowed the cream-colored scarf Grace wore tied around her neck and tucked it into the collar of Dave’s shirt.

“There,” he said as he smoothed it into place. “Now you’re not a dead soldier, you’re a soldier on leave who’s out at a fancy restaurant.”

“Right.” Dave glanced down at his chest. “That old Halloween classic.”

“Can it before I assign you to latrine duty, private.”

Dave started to laugh, but was startled by Ben suddenly jogging through the front door out of the house. For a moment he was worried, because it couldn’t be a good sign that he was already calling it a night, but his eyes were dancing with excitement.

“Klaus, I need you to make me physical for a minute,” he said. “Please.”

Klaus took another lollipop out of the bowl instead. “You’re home early,” he commented in a measured tone. “Having fun with the ghost gang?”

Ben’s face split into a beaming smile. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, we found these teenagers having a party in a cemetery, and one of the girls made everyone try to ‘summon a spirit’ or whatever, and then my friend Cora knocked over a beer can.”

He let out an incredulous laugh. “I mean, she just knocked it over!” he marveled. “A whole beer can! Like—_how?”_

Dave couldn’t help grinning at his enthusiasm. “Woman of many talents, that Cora.”

“The kids all freaked out and I felt really bad at first, but then they started trying to get her to do it again,” Ben told him excitedly. “They were like, _fun_-scared, not scared-scared. So it was okay, I guess.”

Klaus pulled the lollipop out of his mouth with a loud smack of his lips. “Sounds thrilling,” he said flatly. “Why am I making you corporeal, exactly? Are you going to hand out candy with us?”

“Oh, no—we met this new ghost whose niece stole all her jewelry while she was sick, and one of our friends died in a fire and his clothes are still burning, so we’re going over to the niece’s place to see if he can set off the smoke alarms. I’m just showing Cora the kittens real quick first.”

Ben was practically bouncing on the balls of his feet. Dave wondered for a split second if this was a pick-up attempt, but he swiftly realized that no, he was honestly just that stoked to show off his cats.

His own younger brother had used the family dog to score dates with half the girls in the neighborhood, but Ben was more innocent in his thirties than that little Don Juan-a-be had been at age eleven.

Once Ben had taken off back indoors, Klaus pushed Dave by the shoulders into his empty chair and climbed into his lap. He was a little jittery all of a sudden, fussing with his hair, scratching at his elbows. Dave stroked a hand down his back, and his shoulders twitched under the touch.

It couldn’t be easy to watch his brother go out and get up to hijinks while he sat at home having a very G-rated Halloween with their mother. He’d been getting antsy lately, Klaus, and Dave sensed it wasn’t all down to sobriety.

He still had his bad days, of course. The days when a sharp craving would send him into a funk, and he’d slam doors and snap at Diego and hurl books at Luther for having the nerve to remind him it was his turn to take out the trash. But those days were becoming fewer and farther between, and now he needed to find something to do besides drugs.

Dave had an idea he’d been keeping in his back pocket for when the time seemed right. Maybe the time was now.

“Hey.” He bounced his leg under Klaus’s knee to get his attention. “I had a thought.”

Klaus frowned at him. “Was it that I should file a class-action lawsuit against the entire fashion industry for not putting pockets in women’s clothing, and at first everyone will laugh at me, but then I’ll prove it’s actually a global conspiracy to force women to buy more handbags since there’s nowhere else to put their stuff, and then I’ll be a hero and someone will make a movie about me?”

“Ah… no.”

“Oh. Well, that was a thought I just had. There’s no place in this dress to keep my cigarettes.”

“I don’t have a handbag,” said Grace, “so I add pockets to my clothing myself.”

Klaus pumped a fist into the air. “Start the revolution, Mom!”

“Oh. Alright, dear.”

Dave shook his head. “Well, maybe that’s a plan for next weekend. For right now, I was thinking that you could get a job.”

Klaus reared back, looking insulted. “Excuse me?”

“Not for the money, more for something to do,” Dave explained. “You know, get out of the house on the regular, see new faces. Just something part-time. It might be fun.”

Klaus leaned back into him with a derisive snort, but his mental gears were turning, Dave could tell. “I’ve never had a real job.” He picked at a fingernail. “Can you imagine if I worked at, like, a bank? I’d eat all those little mints they put out and get fired.”

Dave shrugged. “I can’t picture you working at a bank, no. But maybe a thrift store, or a record shop? Someplace like that.”

Klaus raised an eyebrow at him and Dave rubbed a reassuring thumb over his knee.

“Food for thought. That’s all.”

He’d let him chew on it for a while. Klaus was always saying _‘I can’t, I can’t, I can’t,’_ but with a little motivation, he could do damn near anything. In Vietnam, he’d once dragged an injured squad mate three miles back to camp with a travois he’d made from sticks and his own shirt, and this past summer he’d managed to shoplift a whole watermelon.

Sometimes Dave had to wonder how he’d gotten so lucky, to land a guy who was both gorgeous _and_ smart.

It started getting busy then, a long parade of zombies and Jedis and Tinkerbelles and one very precocious mini Richard Nixon. The bowl of guts was the popular option for candy, but Grace handed out treats to the more timid children, and Klaus’s mood grew brighter by the minute.

Dave, for his part, was happy just to kick back and watch the show. He had moved to the top step to let Klaus have the chair after he almost toppled out of his lap, but it was an upgrade, if anything.

He had a perfect view of Klaus’s legs in those mile-high heels from there, and they went _all_ the way up.

An hour went by, or maybe closer to two, and the stream of trick-or-treaters was slowing to a trickle. After a pack of cheerleaders had collected their Snickers and left, Klaus rose from his seat and stretched out his back.

“I need a smoke and a tinkle, not necessarily in that order,” he announced. “Protect my mother from any adorably mischievous neighbor kids in my absence, Davey-cakes.”

“June Cleaver wasn’t on _Dennis the Menace_, but you got it.”

“Whatever, you big nerd.”

Dave laughed under his breath and picked Sir Reginald’s journal back up, keeping one eye on Grace in case she did something interesting.

_April 4th, 1974_

_I have reached an accord with the automobile manufacturer, and we wait now only for the transfer of funds. _

_This will conclude my business dealings in Germany. The trip was an abominable waste of time, and I have set my sights on prospects in Scandinavia. There is a ready-to-assemble furniture company in Sweden that has begun expanding their market, but if their business model is half as flimsy as their products, then it would be a most unwise investment._

_On the subject of unwise investments, the pocket guide to the city I purchased has proven utterly useless. I had arranged to meet an acquaintance from one of the local universities for dinner this evening, but he failed to arrive. When I called him from my hotel room later, I learned he had been waiting for me at another restaurant by a similar name on the other side of town._

_These people have had their telephones for close to a century now—it is maddening that they have yet to create a mobile communication device more sophisticated than the radio. Abiding by the limits of their inferior technology is an indignity I can scarcely bear at times._

‘A mobile communication device?’ Like a phone you carried around in your pocket? Sir Reginald knew this was planet Earth, not the starship fucking _Enterprise,_ didn’t he?

What a loon.

The front door opened and Dave looked up, expecting to see Klaus, but it was Luther who stepped outside.

“Hey,” he said, his eyes flickering between Grace and Dave. “Everything okay out here?”

“Oh, yes, dear! We’re having a lovely time.”

“Nothing to report,” Dave agreed.

“Oh.” Luther fiddled with the cap of the water bottle he held. He looked disappointed. “That’s… good.”

Dave bit the insides of his lips and warned himself not to laugh.

Luther had sounded like a real schmendrick in the stories Klaus had told about him, and he’d been expecting to dislike him when they finally met—but he just _couldn’t._

He was always doing goofy shit like this. Popping up out of the blue all businesslike to see what was going on—like he was management doing his rounds—but then as soon as he found that nobody needed him for anything, he would immediately deflate and turn awkward.

Sometimes Dave pretended he needed help moving a heavy box or something, to make him feel useful.

What could he say? He’d always had a soft spot for the lost and the clueless.

“What are you up to tonight?” Dave asked. “Feel like giving out candy?”

“Oh.” Luther shifted his weight and shook his head. “No. No, I, uh… Allison was taking Claire trick-or-treating and she said she was going to call once they got home so… I don’t want to miss the phone ringing.”

Oh, hell. Maybe he should suggest that Luther also get a job. He and Klaus could carpool.

“Trick or treat!”

A trio of young girls came dashing up the walk, followed by a teenager Dave guessed to be somebody’s older sister.

As Grace handed out the candy and exclaimed over their costumes, the older girl stared up at Luther from the bottom of the steps. He took a long drink out of his water bottle, looking profoundly uncomfortable.

“That’s an amazing costume,” she said finally. “The hair on your hands looks real. What’s it made from?”

Luther blinked.

He drew in a breath like he was gearing up to speak, but all he did was stand there in panicky silence, mouth hanging open like a fish and a look in his eye like a cornered animal.

“It’s, uh. It’s… organic.” Dave forced a smile. “I guess your costume is ‘got stuck babysitting,’ huh? That one never goes out of style.”

Luther exhaled, but the girl wasn’t so easy to distract.

“No but like, where’d you get it?” she asked. “It’s just, I’m in theater at school, and we’re doing _The Nutcracker_ for our Christmas play, and fur like that would look awesome on the talking mice.”

…Oh, _no._

“You know, I—I really couldn’t say.” Dave spread his hands in apology. “Sorry.”

“Oh.” She shrugged, though she looked a touch disappointed. “Well, that’s okay.”

“Good luck with your play!” he called weakly as she shepherded the smaller girls down the walkway.

Internally wincing, he turned around to face Luther and assess the damages.

He looked… less upset than he’d been expecting. Embarrassed for sure, but not sad or angry—there was a sort of weary resignation about him, as though he knew this kind of thing was going to happen to him over and over and over again, so he might as well get used to it.

Dave thought of his Uncle Simon, whose face had been rearranged by a piece of shrapnel in the Second World War. His mother had told him it was a fight to get him out of the house for years afterwards, but Dave could only remember him loud and laughing and causing a commotion on the subway by pretending to sneeze and popping out his glass eye.

Luther didn’t have Uncle Simon’s humor or his prosthesis, but he’d get there, too, he thought.

Someday.

Luther shuffled his feet when he realized that Dave was watching him. “Uh. Well. I’m going in, so… let me know if you guys need anything.”

“Sure.”

He wanted to say more, but all of the Hargreeves got sort of funny if they thought you were being too nice to them. He’d tell Klaus to ask for help taking in the table and chairs later, and that would have to be enough.

Grace reached out to brush lint from Luther’s shirt as he lumbered past her.

“You look nice in blue.”

A smile flickered across his face faster than a comet. “Uh. Thanks, Mom.”

Dave studied her in silent wonder. How the hell could a robot read the room so well? Shit, she was smoother than any of the humans living in the house.

Klaus wandered back outside—barefoot, to Dave’s disappointment—just as Diego’s car pulled into the garage. Grace excused herself to go see if he wanted anything to eat.

“I’m cold,” Klaus complained as he dropped into his chair.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” said Dave.

Klaus rubbed his arms with a melodramatic shiver. “I can feel the hypothermia settling in now.”

“Sounds like a difficult time for you.”

“Death will be swift.”

“I’ll send your family a casserole.”

Klaus smiled and arched an eyebrow, wordlessly daring him to keep it up and see what happened.

With a snort of laughter, Dave stood up and dragged the other chair over next to him.

“You _are_ cold,” he noted as he wrapped an arm around his shoulders. “What happened to your shoes?”

“Beats me,” said Klaus, snuggling closer. “I took them off to give my feet a break and they disappeared.”

Dollars to donuts Five had found them on the floor someplace and chucked them into the third floor closet. That was where most of Klaus’s shoes ended up, but Dave had never grassed on him. ‘_Keep a little secret to keep the peace_,’ as his father used to say.

He’d usually said it after Dave or one of his siblings had caught him breaking kosher behind their mother’s back, but he thought the point still stood.

“Do you think they’d hire me at Griddy’s?” Klaus wondered out loud. “And more importantly—would they let me wear the same uniform as the waitresses?”

“Maybe to hiring you. Probably not to the uniform, I’m sorry to say.” Dave carded his fingers through Klaus’s hair. “What about that pizza place near the library? You could be their counter girl.”

Klaus made a face at him. “Their dress code is aprons and ratty T-shirts. Not even I can pull that look off.”

Dave smiled and scritched at his scalp. “But you’d make a hot librarian.”

“I would, but I can’t be quiet enough to work in a library.” He tapped a finger to his lips. “Ooh, I should be a construction worker! Not the kind that picks up heavy stuff, though. I’d just wander around in a tank top and a hard hat to boost morale.”

“A sexy garbage man,” Dave suggested with a grin. “Cut a hole in the middle of your jumpsuit to show off your bellybutton.”

“Or a yoga instructor! Shit, I look so good in stretch pants my students wouldn’t even care I don’t know yoga.”

The front door opened with a bang and Diego came tripping out onto the porch, wild-eyed and breathing hard.

“What the _fuck,_ Klaus?” he demanded furiously. “What the hell is your problem?!”

Klaus tilted his head and blinked a few times, innocent as a lamb. “Whatever are you talking about, Diego dearest?”

“I’m talking about the fucking c-cr—!” Diego pointed an emphatic finger up at the second floor windows while he untangled his tongue. “The fucking _crash test dummy in my bed!”_

Klaus scrunched up his face to look offended, and Dave had to admit, it was pretty convincing. “Diego, I am hurt,” he said sadly. “Why would I, your loving brother and number one fan, do such a thing?”

_“Cut your shit, Klaus!” _

Klaus held out his hands in feigned surprise. “Gee willikers, calm down. I don’t know what you’re talking about, honest.”

“The hell you don’t,” Diego snapped, although there was a hint of doubt in his voice.

Dave let his gaze roam over the colored lights above the door and silently prayed that he wouldn’t get dragged into this.

Diego been standoffish with him at first—which was fair, because he knew Klaus had hooked up with some real gems over the years—but as time went on, they’d gotten friendly.

Diego seemed to like having someone around who was into all the stereotypical ‘guy stuff’ his brothers were not. Someone who was happy to watch the boxing pay-per-view or a _Rocky_ marathon with him, and who would rather play darts than Scrabble, and who agreed that, yeah, the way his new knife could cut through four layers of cardboard like butter _was_ pretty rad, and they _should_ see how it would handle a plastic bottle.

But behind the leather and the scowls, Diego was a sensitive soul. Dave really didn’t want him to think they were ganging up on him—his feelings bruised awful easy.

“I honestly, truly don’t know anything about your bed and a crash test dummy, cross my heart and hope to die,” Klaus was insisting. He leaned forward and fished a candy bar out of the bowl on the table. “Here, have a Snickers. You’ll feel better.”

Diego snatched the candy from his hand and angrily beaned Klaus off the head with it.

“Ow!”

“That didn’t hurt.”

“My skull is intact, but my feelings are in pieces!”

“Guys—“ Dave began hesitantly, but then, to his relief, a fresh group of kids came running up the steps.

“Trick or treat!” yelled the seventeenth Spiderman of the night.

Diego crossed his arms over his chest and leaned against the side of the house while Klaus gave his spiel about the guts. The kids bounced around him like a herd of overexcited puppies, high on sugar and the thrill of being out way, way past their bedtime.

This group was chaperoned by a sour-faced boy of around sixteen or so, who shoved his hands into the pockets of his hoodie and glanced at where Dave’s arm draped over Klaus’s shoulders.

His first instinct was to pull away, but he stopped himself. This was not the New York of his youth.

Besides, Klaus was brave enough to wear makeup outdoors and wink at hunky guys on the street—the least he deserved was someone who wouldn’t play the ‘we’re just friends’ game in public.

The children collected their candy and tore off down the steps, shrieking and tripping over each other. The older boy lingered for a second, and he threw a look over his shoulder at Klaus as he turned away.

“Nice dress,” he said, with the kind of scorn Dave hadn’t heard since his own years in high school—casual, but _withering._

Before either he or Klaus could react, Diego pushed himself away from the side of the house.

“Nice pube ‘stache, you little fucking dweeb,” he snapped.

The boy blinked in surprise and hurried down the steps.

“Go home and make out with a pillow,” mumbled Diego.

Dave smiled at him. He would have felt bad insulting a kid, no matter how much a dickhead they were being—but it was kind of nice to have someone in his corner who didn’t give a shit. He really was a mensch, Diego. In an angry sort of way.

Klaus leaned around Dave to stare at him, brows raised and eyes soft with wonder.

“Ahem.” His lips twitched nervously once he had his brother’s attention. “I would like to make a formal apology for putting a seductive mannequin in your bed.”

Diego blew up. “Goddammit, Klaus, what is _the matter_ with you? That wasn’t fucking funny!”

Klaus slumped into his seat, his expression souring. “Yeah, you know what else wasn’t funny? That time you graffiti’d Dad’s Vermeer and let me take the fall for it.”

“THAT—I—What does—“

Seeming to give up on making sense of the situation, Diego grunted in frustration and swung around to appeal to Dave. “There are wet flower petals all mixed up in my sheets, and that thing is wearing a pair of our _mother’s shoes_—“

Klaus tugged urgently at Dave’s arm. “Dad made me run fifty laps around the courtyard in July, and you know how I feel about my feet getting sweaty—“

This, Dave reflected, would be a very convenient time to turn invisible again.

“That was more than twenty years ago!” Diego yelled at Klaus.

“So you admit it!”

“It’s—I—“ He trailed off, glowering. “Why do you think it was me?”

“’Why do I think it was you,’” Klaus echoed, his voice heavy with sarcasm. “We-e-ell, it was your handwriting, and you were mad at me that day for wiping a booger in your hair, so let’s do the math, shall we?”

Dave jumped in his seat at a sudden cracking sound. Next to him, Klaus let out a startled ‘eep!’

Five stood at the table, grabbing a bar of chocolate out of the candy bowl, and was gone as quickly as he’d arrived.

There was a moment of silence in his wake.

“I said ‘math’ and he just _appeared,”_ Klaus whispered in awe.

“You guys planned that,” accused Diego. He frowned at Dave like he was looking for backup. “They planned that.”

Dave shook his head. “Uh… no. No, I don’t think they did, man.”

“Calculus,” Klaus said in a loud voice. His gaze darted suspiciously around the front steps. “The Pythagorean Theorem. Two plus two equals six.”

Nothing happened.

Klaus blew a sad raspberry.

“You know, I think the crash test dummy wants to go to the library next,” he said to Diego. “I think it wants to hang out in the alcove between the chemistry and physics sections.”

“Something is actually, medically wrong with you,” Diego told him in disgust. Then, “Let’s go.”

Klaus clapped in excitement and hopped out of his chair. “Come on, Davey! You can be our lookout. Make goose noises if you see Five coming before we get done, okay?”

“Oh. Well…”

On the one hand, it was sort of fucked up to prank Five with a dummy, seeing as he had… a complicated relationship with mannequins. On the other hand, the next obvious target was Luther, who was already having a rough enough night.

Either way, Dave decided, it was a family matter.

“You know, I’ll just, ah… I’ll just sit out here and see if there are any more trick-or-treaters,” he said. “And we don’t want anybody to steal your decorations, right?”

Klaus leaned down to pinch his cheek. “You are terrible at coming up with excuses,” he cooed. “We’ll be right back, don’t miss me too much.”

Diego followed him indoors, wondering out loud what kind of idiot went outside barefoot in this weather.

Dave stretched out his legs and picked up Sir Reginald’s journal. There were only a few pages left, and he wanted to try to get through to the end before he turned back into ectoplasm, or whatever the hell he was normally made of.

_April 9th, 1974_

_I write this sitting on a northbound train, almost too angry to put pen to paper._

_The automobile manufacturer received my payment, and then declared bankruptcy. _

_Their financials all appeared to be in order when I reviewed them, so I can only assume the figures I was shown were doctored. I believe my investment was used to settle outstanding debts._

_I am not without legal recourse, but it is unclear what, if any, assets they have remaining—and that is not to mention the expense of finding and retaining a reputable lawyer in a foreign country._

_Damn them! They are unspeakably fortunate that I have a greater moral sense than they, for even as I work to save this wretched planet, I despise it, and every last soul inhabiting it. Their greed, their self-indulgence, their apathy towards those who aspire to greatness—I have searched high and low for a redeeming quality in humanity, and I have found none._

Holy _shit _was he ever pissed. Dave could see it in the careless splotches of ink on the page, the viciousness of the punctuation. Like he’d been stabbing the paper as he wrote.

He smiled a little to himself. _Eat your heart out, Sir Reginald._

He was so wrapped up in the delicious taste of schadenfreude that he was startled when a soft voice next to him called, “Dave.”

Ben was standing there on the steps with his hood pulled up.

“Dave,” he repeated in a wooden voice. “I fucked up.”

Dave lowered the journal, dread beginning to stir in his gut. “What do you mean?”

Ben sank down to sit on the top step, sighing all the way.

There was a party, he explained. College students in an apartment off-campus. Already halfway to blitzed, and searching for a missing dime bag. Someone had brought out a Ouija board and the more seasoned ghosts at the table had taken turns answering questions—a good time, until Ben had been convinced to try.

“One of the guys was kidding around and he asked, ‘Do you know who stole Greg’s weed?’” Ben scrubbed his hands over his face. “I was trying to move the planchette to ‘No,’ but I couldn’t get it very far, and… and it stopped over the letter ‘U.’”

“Uh-oh.”

Ben made a distressed noise in the back of his throat. “He got mad and started asking which of his friends made it say that. This one girl was like, ‘Well, you were the only person who went into the bedroom,’ and then he called her a bitch.”

“Ben, man,” Dave started cajolingly. “They were young and they were drinking, I’m sure they’ll make up tom—“

“So then this second guy goes, ‘Don’t talk to her like that,’ and the girl told _him_ to stay out of her business because he wasn’t her boyfriend, they were just hooking up. And then some other girl was like, ‘What the fuck, you said _I_ was the only one you were hooking up with.’”

“…Okay. I’m thinking that their problems run deeper than some missing weed—“

“And then the first guy says, ‘You’re all calling me a thief, but I know at least two people didn’t chip in their share for the pizza,’ and then … I don’t even _know_ what happened, suddenly everyone was yelling at each other.”

Ben paused and ran a hand through his hair. “Someone threw a drink. The neighbor started banging on the door and telling them all to shut up because he was studying for a test. The police were in the lobby when we left.”

He sighed again and dropped his forehead to his knees. “I don’t think Greg is ever getting his weed back.”

Dave studied his hunched, miserable form with mild amazement. For all that Klaus had worried about Ben landing himself in some sort of trouble, neither of them had ever guessed that Ben might _be_ the trouble.

He was honestly sort of impressed.

“I’m never going haunting again,” Ben said solemnly.

“Aw. You will.”

Dave got up and sat next to him on the steps. He couldn’t really touch him while only one of them had a physical body, but he put his arm around where his shoulders would be, if they were solid.

“I’ve been a fly on the wall at tons of Halloween parties, and believe me— a noise complaint and an argument would have been a happy ending at a lot of ‘em. People get _rowdy.”_

Ben twined the string of his hoodie around his finger. “One year I saw a guy get his dick stuck in a fence,” he confided.

“See, there you go.” Dave tried and failed to clap him on the back. “The kids you haunted are gonna get a stern talking-to by the police, crash early, and then they’ll wake up tomorrow and barely remember any of it. You saved them from the temptation of fence-humping. It’s a mitzvah.”

Ben let out a thin laugh. “Well, when you put it that way.” He raised his head. “Just… don’t mention any of this to Klaus? Or anybody else, but especially not Klaus. I’d never hear the end of it.”

Yeah. Neither would Dave.

“Deal.”

Klaus dashed out of the house, cackling with glee and wearing a pair of snow boots.

“Oh my God, oh my God,” he babbled. “We built a book fort around the dummy and put the coffee pot in there with it. He’s gonna be SO MAD.”

“What?” Ben asked in confusion. “What did I miss?”

Klaus launched into explaining his plans to torment Five, and Dave drifted back over to the table. The less he knew about this, the better.

He picked the journal up where he’d left off.

_By my calculations, I have approximately fifteen years before my plans must move into their next stage. There is no time left to waste, to stumble and to start anew. My course is set, and I cannot deviate from it._

_I think of all the worlds saved and all the worlds lost, my past successes and my past failures, the years I have lived and the galaxies I have travelled, and I realize they matter nothing._

_ I am growing old, and this planet, this Earth, is to be my final labor. My work here transcends duty—it will be my legacy._

_This time, I cannot fail. So long as I have blood in my veins and breath in my lungs, I will not fail._

Dave traced his finger across the page. Klaus was still nattering away in the background, but Dave’s thoughts felt louder.

He’d been trying to push away the growing sense that something was—_off_, about the journal, and about Sir Reginald himself. Been trying to convince himself that he was just strange, and arrogant, and didn’t mean things in a literal way.

Because if you took everything he’d written at face value, it really sounded like the old fuck had been some kind of _alien._

And if he was, then… what did that make his children?

Klaus fell silent and took a step towards him.

The colored lights made the highlighter on his cheeks shimmer, and his fake lashes were long enough to cast spidery shadows across his face. His lips stretched into a wide smile, teeth glistening. He looked, for a moment, downright otherworldly.

Then he picked a squished grape out of the bowl of guts and popped it into his mouth, and the spell was broken.

_I’m being an idiot,_ Dave thought. Their father’s writings made the Hargreeves nothing more or less than what they’d always been—Luther and Diego and Allison and Five. Quiet Vanya and sweet Ben, and his beautiful, ridiculous, wonderful Klaus.

“Sweetheart, you probably shouldn’t eat that. An awful lot of kids had their hands in there tonight, and they never remember to wash with soap.”

“No, it’s good for your immune system!” Klaus slurped down a strand of clammy spaghetti. “Also, it’s tasty.”

Ben crinkled his nose at Dave. “I think we’re watching the birth of a new plague.”

“Well, if you’re done playing Caspar, we could be watching _Ghostbusters_ instead,” Klaus told him snippily.

Klaus loved that movie. It wasn’t true to life, but he was as enchanted by the idea of being able to suck asshole ghosts into a vacuum cleaner as little girls were by Disney princesses.

Ben winced. “Yeah, I’m, uh. I’m home for the night, I think.”

“_Wundebar!” _Klaus slung the plastic skeleton in a fireman’s hold over his shoulder. “Now if only Davey can spare ninety minutes from his reading, my Halloween will be complete.”

“I think I can pencil you in,” said Dave. “I finished it, anyway.”

“Oh?” Klaus glanced up from folding the silver fabric he’d had covering the chair. “Did you dig up any juicy dirt on our dear father? Secret crushes, plans for world domination? Tell me you at least found out his top five boy bands.”

Dave took a second before he answered.

There was no good way to tell someone _‘Hey, I think your Dad’s an alien.’_

Much less the love of your life.

On his favorite day of the year.

And, honestly, what was more likely—that Sir Reginald had been an intergalactic savior of planets? Or that he’d been a crazy old man, fixated on the end of the world?

Dave glanced at the stuffed crows.

“Nah,” he said finally. “It was all a bunch of bullshit. A big waste of time, really.”

Klaus didn’t need to know _every_ dumb thought that popped into his head.

**Author's Note:**

> I sort of love the idea of police involvement being a Hargreeves holiday tradition. First the 4th of July, now Halloween.... maybe the bomb squad will show up on Christmas, who knows!


End file.
